What Starbucks' history tells us about Howard Schultz's possible 2020 run

January 28, 2019 / 4:14 pm

caption: Howard Schultz, former Executive Chairman of Starbucks Corporation, speaks after receiving the Distinguished Business Leadership Award, during the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Leadership Awards dinner in Washington, D.C., May 10, 2018. (DoD Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. James K. McCann)

Bill Radke speaks to Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn who has studied the coffee giant and its leader for the past two decades.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he's "seriously considering" running for president in 2020 as a "centrist independent." But while he may call himself an independent, the company he ran took some actions a lot of people call "liberal," like hiring refugees and supporting same sex marriage.

We talk about Starbucks' policies under Schultz's tenure and what it might tell us about his possible presidential candidacy.

Schultz's Starbucks record

Beating Jay Inslee to the nearly-inevitable punch, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz has declared his candidacy for president. He’s running as an independent, so we can’t attach party labels to his potential platforms. We asked Nancy Koehn, Harvard Business School historian, about what we could learn from his tenure at the coffee behemoth.

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Bill Radke
Host

Bill hosts Week In Review and Words in Review. After starting with KUOW as a University of Washington student in 1985, Bill was KUOW's morning host in the '90s and the creator of past show, Rewind, a news-satire show heard on KUOW and nationwide on NPR. Bill moved away to Southern California to host American Public Media's Weekend America and Marketplace Morning Report and returned to KUOW in 2012.
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